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Authors: Robert M Poole
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ships that the men hardly had room to roll over; when one did, the jostling set off a chain reaction of groans from stem to
stern. Trains rattled into the capital with a similar cargo of broken fighters. 24
The poet and war nurse Walt Whitman was waiting to greet the first hospital ships when they arrived from the front. They usually
came in the night, ghostly white steamers emerging at the Seventh Street wharves. One night, Whitman found them docked in
the rain. A few sputtering torches cast the scene in spooky light as, one by one, the men were lifted off, carried ashore
on stretchers, and laid on the ground, there to await transfer to one of the city’s improvised hospitals. “The pale, helpless
soldiers had been debark’d and lay around on the wharf,” Whitman wrote. “The rain was, probably, grateful to them; at any
rate they were exposed to it … All around—on the wharf, on the ground, out on side places—the men are lying on blankets,
old quilts, & c., with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs … Quite often they arrive at the rate of 1000 a day
… The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.” 25
Desperately short of hospital space, Washington made do with temporary fixes. The Capitol building was outfitted with cots, which filled the House and Senate chambers and
overflowed into the Rotunda. Iron beds were stacked in the Patent Office, where the sick convalesced among the glass display
cases of inventors’ models. Hotels were transformed into hospitals, as were a synagogue, a clutch of mansions on Minnesota
Row, Georgetown College, the former Republican campaign headquarters, the Odd Fellows Hall, the Smithsonian Castle, and no
less than thirteen churches; in the latter, bells were silenced in deference to those recuperating under the rafters. New
hospital tents and whitewashed pavilions were hastily constructed on Judiciary Square, along the Washington Mall, and on the heights of Meridian Hill. Other war casualties—including those with no hint of mental impairment—were housed
in the insane asylum. At least twenty-two hospitals came into being as a result of the Peninsula Campaign, which transformed
the nation’s capital into a city of fifty thousand patients. This vast army of the wounded, in Whitman’s phrase, was “more
numerous in itself than the Washington of ten or fifteen years ago.” 26
Modern sanitary practices were unheard of at this stage of the war. The new Armory Square Hospital, while convenient to the
wharves and the train depot, overlooked the Washington Canal, a sluggish open sewer linking the Potomac River with its Eastern Branch tributary. 27 At these and other military hospitals, amputation was the preferred treatment for serious wounds. Performed by hard-pressed
and often incompetent surgeons, the procedures were frequently botched and had to be redone. “Many of the poor afflicted young
men are crazy,” Whitman wrote. “They have suffered too much.” 28
After surgery, a doctor’s assistant might sponge down the operating table with cold water before a new patient was brought
in and laid out to be probed, sawed, or sliced with instruments wiped off—but not sterilized—from the previous operation. Surgeons explored wounds with their bare fingers, honed their operating knives on their boots, and moistened sutures with spit before threading silk through a needle. If a soldier survived battle, and the painful journey from the front, and the brusque attentions of army doctors, he remained a prime target for gangrene, pneumonia, diarrhea, typhoid, smallpox, measles, malaria, and the other fatal diseases haunting army camps and hospitals—indeed, sickness and infection would kill many more Civil War soldiers than bullets. 29
The country, which had never before faced death on such an enormous scale, was as poorly prepared for burying its soldiers as it had been for giving them proper hospital care. 30 On the front
ships that the men hardly had room to roll over; when one did, the jostling set off a chain reaction of groans from stem to
stern. Trains rattled into the capital with a similar cargo of broken fighters. 24
The poet and war nurse Walt Whitman was waiting to greet the first hospital ships when they arrived from the front. They usually
came in the night, ghostly white steamers emerging at the Seventh Street wharves. One night, Whitman found them docked in
the rain. A few sputtering torches cast the scene in spooky light as, one by one, the men were lifted off, carried ashore
on stretchers, and laid on the ground, there to await transfer to one of the city’s improvised hospitals. “The pale, helpless
soldiers had been debark’d and lay around on the wharf,” Whitman wrote. “The rain was, probably, grateful to them; at any
rate they were exposed to it … All around—on the wharf, on the ground, out on side places—the men are lying on blankets,
old quilts, & c., with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs … Quite often they arrive at the rate of 1000 a day
… The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.” 25
Desperately short of hospital space, Washington made do with temporary fixes. The Capitol building was outfitted with cots, which filled the House and Senate chambers and
overflowed into the Rotunda. Iron beds were stacked in the Patent Office, where the sick convalesced among the glass display
cases of inventors’ models. Hotels were transformed into hospitals, as were a synagogue, a clutch of mansions on Minnesota
Row, Georgetown College, the former Republican campaign headquarters, the Odd Fellows Hall, the Smithsonian Castle, and no
less than thirteen churches; in the latter, bells were silenced in deference to those recuperating under the rafters. New
hospital tents and whitewashed pavilions were hastily constructed on Judiciary Square, along the Washington Mall, and on the heights of Meridian Hill. Other war casualties—including those with no hint of mental impairment—were housed
in the insane asylum. At least twenty-two hospitals came into being as a result of the Peninsula Campaign, which transformed
the nation’s capital into a city of fifty thousand patients. This vast army of the wounded, in Whitman’s phrase, was “more
numerous in itself than the Washington of ten or fifteen years ago.” 26
Modern sanitary practices were unheard of at this stage of the war. The new Armory Square Hospital, while convenient to the
wharves and the train depot, overlooked the Washington Canal, a sluggish open sewer linking the Potomac River with its Eastern Branch tributary. 27 At these and other military hospitals, amputation was the preferred treatment for serious wounds. Performed by hard-pressed
and often incompetent surgeons, the procedures were frequently botched and had to be redone. “Many of the poor afflicted young
men are crazy,” Whitman wrote. “They have suffered too much.” 28
After surgery, a doctor’s assistant might sponge down the operating table with cold water before a new patient was brought
in and laid out to be probed, sawed, or sliced with instruments wiped off—but not sterilized—from the previous operation. Surgeons explored wounds with their bare fingers, honed their operating knives on their boots, and moistened sutures with spit before threading silk through a needle. If a soldier survived battle, and the painful journey from the front, and the brusque attentions of army doctors, he remained a prime target for gangrene, pneumonia, diarrhea, typhoid, smallpox, measles, malaria, and the other fatal diseases haunting army camps and hospitals—indeed, sickness and infection would kill many more Civil War soldiers than bullets. 29
The country, which had never before faced death on such an enormous scale, was as poorly prepared for burying its soldiers as it had been for giving them proper hospital care. 30 On the front
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